# data[].attributes.body
Music can literally heal the injured brain

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Articles, interviews, and announcements on topics related to the intersection of neuroscience and society.

# data[].attributes.headline
Does age effect how music affects your brain?

# data[].attributes.subject
Does age effect how music affects your brain?

# data[].attributes.body
"Listening to music makes people more inclined to spent time and energy helping others. This is especially pronounced when music is appreciated in a group such as when dancing, playing music with others, or attending a concert."

# data[].attributes.body
"The dark side of this is that lyrics can greatly influence the listener as well. Songs with negative lyrics or messages, when constantly listened to, becomes ingrained in a person’s psyche and can be subconsciously recalled"

# data[].attributes.body
HPU plays instrumental music in the promenade which is the center of educational buildings so this makes sense

# data[].attributes.body
The upbeat rock music gets your heart racing and makes the brain more alert which increases motivation

# data[].attributes.headline
Worship Music = relieves emotional anxieties 

# data[].attributes.subject
Worship Music = relieves emotional anxieties 

# data[].attributes.body
A lot of people turn to this genre when lost to find a sense of relief , this music soothes the part of the brain that deals with your anxieties

# data[].attributes.headline
What kinds of music do what to a person?

# data[].attributes.subject
What kinds of music do what to a person?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Many people regularly talk about how music affects the personality and lifestyle of its listeners, ranging from friendly discussions between parents and their kids, to congress lobbying to ban certain kinds of music or to at least label and restrict them. For the most part, people have dismissed such claims as paranoia at best, and ludicrous at worst, stating that while genres of music may have immediate effects while being listened to, it does not dictate people's personality and thinking. But as it turns out, recent studies have shown that musical preference may show the listener's personality, and in turn, affect the personality of a person as well.

A reflection of the mind
One such study from the University of Cambridge showed a method of determining how people think and act based on the music they like to listen to. The study targeted over 4,000 listeners, and used a Facebook personality test app to give the participants a set of questions to determine specific personality traits. After a set period of time, the participants yet again received another questionnaire, this time with 15-second song snippets from 50 songs that represented up to 26 different genres of music, to see how they'd react and what kind of music they'd prefer. The results of both tests were then matched to see if there are patterns and correlations to personalities and music preferences.

As it turned out, there were correlations. Mellow music listeners, like R&B and slow jazz, exhibit more empathy, while rock, hip-hop, and house music listeners are more systematic and structural in thought. In addition, people on the more empathic side preferred music with less energy and focus more on negative and heavy emotions like depression, while the systematic side reveled in positive energy and emotions, like happiness and strength.
Requiem Mass in D Minor, one of the most famous works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Basically, people who prefer slower, more smooth music, are more emotional, while people who prefer faster, more energetic music are more logical and structural, according to the study.
But while music may be a reflection of one's personality and thinking, can it really affect one's personality and thinking as well?
Music's influence
is an example of classical music that can influence behavior.

Remember how lullabies can make babies (and even adults) fall asleep, and how a school's theme song in a sporting event can just lift your heart up and get you ready for battle? Those are examples of music affecting one's emotions. This, we already know. But can music truly, in the long run, affect someone's personality and behavior?

The answer is YES.

Brainwave entertainment like Brainwave Power Music's binaural beats and isochronic tones tracks do this regularly. But aside from this, common genres of music are also known to affect the personality regularly, due to their beat, the tones the use, and the overall composition of the pieces of music. And just like the study we talked about above, many studies in the past have also shown this, and have even come up with a list of what certain genres of music do for the person's mind and personality. Here are a few examples, in addition to the ones listed earlier.

1.) Ambient noise promotes creativity - while this is not specifically a genre of music, many musical pieces, including binaural beats tracks, have ambient noises. It was discovered that moderate volume ambient noise greatly promotes creative thinking and abstract processing. Too loud however, and the brain is impaired and overwhelmed with the auditory information. Listening to this regularly will greatly improve creativity even without musical assistance.

2.) Worship music alleviates emotional anxieties - sadness, depression, and a constantly negative personality can be alleviated by worship-music. Studies have shown that people who attend fellowships and engage in the listening and singing of worship music have improved levels of happiness and those with anxiety problems have felt improvements in their own personal feelings, after consistently attending and listening to the songs.

3.) Rock music improves personal motivation - the high energy pace of rock music is not only preferred by systematic people, as indicated above, it also helps in one's own personal motivation. Constantly listening to rock music greatly strengthens the listener's emotional and psychological resolve and can help motivate them on a regular basis. Alternatively, people who prefer other equally energetic genres like hiphop and dance music can also feel the same motivation, as long as it keeps up with a certain tempo and intensity.

The dark side of this is that lyrics can greatly influence the listener as well. Songs with negative lyrics or messages, when constantly listened to, becomes ingrained in a person's psyche and can be subconsciously recalled. So it is also important to make sure lyrics are taken into consideration when listening to songs.

One good way to ensure you get the necessary results is to listen to music tracks that are specifically designed to aid your mind and brain, like our binaural beats and isochronic tones tracks. For example, this binaural beats playlist for happiness and love, that we have prepared especially for our fans.

Check out these items that will help with your lucid dreaming!

The Heart's Ocean is a collection of Brainwave Power Music's original music therapy tracks that all relate to the power of the heart, in its deepest emotional or physical or spiritual aspects. The intention in creating these tracks range from desires to self-healing, to self-loving and acceptance, behavioral change and the vast meanings of what Love truly is.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Your Musical Taste Shows And Affects Your Personality And Behavior

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Many people regularly talk about how music affects the personality and lifestyle of its listeners, ranging from friendly discussions between parents and their kids, to congress lobbying to ban certain kinds of music or to at least label and restrict them.

# data[].attributes.body
Creativity
Emotions
Brain Size
Memory
Brain Health
Personality

# data[].attributes.headline
Is brain size affected by high levels of musical activity?

# data[].attributes.subject
Is brain size affected by high levels of musical activity?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
Buffer: All-you-need social media toolkit for small businesses

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
I'm a big fan of music, and use it a lot when working, but I had no idea about how it really affects our brains and bodies. Since music is such a big part of our lives, I thought it would be interesting and useful to have a look at some of the ways we react to it without even realizing.

"Without music, life would be a mistake" - Friedrich Nietzsche

Of course, music affects many different areas of the brain, as you can see in the image below, so we're only scratching the surface with this post, but let's jump in.

Share stories like this to your social media followers when they're most likely to click, favorite, and reply! Schedule your first post with Buffer.

1. Happy/sad music affects how we see neutral faces:

We can usually pick if a piece of music is particularly happy or sad, but this isn't just a subjective idea that comes from how it makes us feel. In fact, our brains actually respond differently to happy and sad music.

Even short pieces of happy or sad music can affect us. One study showed that after hearing a short piece of music, participants were more likely to interpret a neutral expression as happy or sad, to match the tone of the music they heard. This also happened with other facial expressions, but was most notable for those that were close to neutral.

Something else that's really interesting about how our emotions are affected by music

is that there are two kind of emotions related to music: perceived emotions and felt emotions.

This means that sometimes we can understand the emotions of a piece of music without actually feeling them, which explains why some of us find listening to sad music enjoyable, rather than depressing.

Unlike in real life situations, we don't feel any real threat or danger when listening to music, so we can perceive the related emotions without truly feeling them-almost like vicarious emotions.

2. Ambient noise can improve creativity

We all like to pump up the tunes when we're powering through our to-do lists, right? But when it comes to creative work, loud music may not be the best option.

It turns out that a moderate noise level is the sweet spot for creativity. Even more than low noise levels, ambient noise apparently gets our creative juices flowing, and doesn't put us off the way high levels of noise do.

The way this works is that moderate noise levels increase processing difficulty which promotes abstract processing, leading to higher creativity. In other words, when we struggle (just enough) to process things as we normally would, we resort to more creative approaches.

In high noise levels, however, our creative thinking is impaired because we're overwhelmed and struggle to process information efficiently.

This is very similar to how temperature and lighting can affect our productivity, where paradoxically a slightly more crowded place can be beneficial.

3. Our music choices can predict our personality

Enjoying this post? Share it with your followers at the exact right time with Buffer!

Take this one with a grain of salt, because it's only been tested on young adults (that I know of), but it's still really interesting.

In a study of couples who spent time getting to know each other, looking at each other's top ten favorite songs actually provided fairly reliable predictions as to the listener's personality traits.

The study used five personality traits for the test: openness to experience, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and emotional stability.

Interestingly, some traits were more accurately predicted based on the person's listening habits than others. For instance, openness to experience, extraversion and emotional stability were the easiest to guess correctly. Conscientiousness, on the other hand, wasn't obvious based on musical taste.

Here is also a break-down of how the different genres correspond to our personality, according to a study conducted at Heriot-Watt University:

To break it down, here is the connection they have found:

Blues fans have high self-esteem, are creative, outgoing, gentle and at ease

Jazz fans have high self-esteem, are creative, outgoing and at ease

Classical music fans have high self-esteem, are creative, introvert and at ease

Rap fans have high self-esteem and are outgoing

Opera fans have high self-esteem, are creative and gentle

Country and western fans are hardworking and outgoing

Reggae fans have high self-esteem, are creative, not hardworking, outgoing, gentle and at ease

Dance fans are creative and outgoing but not gentle

Indie fans have low self-esteem, are creative, not hard working, and not gentle

Bollywood fans are creative and outgoing

Rock/heavy metal fans have low self-esteem, are creative, not hard-working, not outgoing, gentle, and at ease

Chart pop fans have high self-esteem, are hardworking, outgoing and gentle, but are not creative and not at ease

Soul fans have high self-esteem, are creative, outgoing, gentle, and at ease

Of course, generalizing based on this study is very hard. However looking at the science of introverts and extroverts, there is some clear overlap.

4. Music can significantly distract us while driving (contrary to common belief)

Another study done on teenagers and young adults focused on how their driving is affected by music.

Drivers were tested while listening to their own choice of music, silence or "safe" music choices provided by the researchers. Of course, their own music was preferred, but it also proved to be more distracting: drivers made more mistakes and drove more aggressively when listening to their own choice of music.

Even more surprising: music provided by the researchers proved to be more beneficial than no music at all. It seems that unfamiliar, or uninteresting, music is best for safe driving.

5. Music training can significantly improve our motor and reasoning skills

We generally assume that learning a musical instrument can be beneficial for kids, but it's actually useful in more ways than we might expect. One study showed that children who had three years or more musical instrument training performed better than those who didn't learn an instrument in auditory discrimination abilities and fine motor skills.

They also tested better on vocabulary and nonverbal reasoning skills, which involve understanding and analyzing visual information, such as identifying relationships, similarities and differences between shapes and patterns.

These two areas in particular are quite removed from musical training as we imagine it, so it's fascinating to see how learning to play an instrument can help kids develop such a wide variety of important skills.

Similar research shows this correlation for exercise and motor skills in the same way, which is also fascinating.

6. Classical music can improve visual attention

It's not just kids that can benefit from musical training or exposure. Stroke patients in one small study showed improved visual attention while listening to classical music.

The study also tried white noise and silence to compare the results, and found that, like the driving study mentioned earlier, silence resulted in the worst scores.

Because this study was so small, the conclusions need to be explored further for validation, but I find it really interesting how music and noise can affect our other senses and abilities-in this case, vision.

7. One-sided phone calls are more distracting than normal conversations

Another study focused on noise, rather than music, showed that when it comes to being distracted by the conversations of others, phone calls where we can only hear one side of the conversation are the worst offenders.

After a survey showed that up to 82% of people find overhearing cellphone conversations annoying, Veronica Galván, a cognitive psychologist at the University of San Diego, decided to study why these are such a pain.

In the study, participants completed word puzzles while one half of them overheard one side of a mundane phone conversation in the background. The other half of the volunteers heard the entire conversation as it took place between two people in the room.

Those who heard the one-sided phone conversation found it more distracting than those who heard both people speaking. They also remembered more of the conversation, showing that it had grabbed their attention more than those who heard both sides and didn't remember as much of the discussion.

The unpredictability of a one-sided conversation seems to be the cause of it grabbing our attention more. Hearing both sides of a conversation, on the other hand, gives us more context which makes it easier to tune out the distraction.

Then again, as we've explored before, getting distracted is often not such a bad things for various reasons.

8. Music helps us exercise

Back to music again, and we can see that just like silence doesn't help us to be more creative or better drivers, it's not much use when we're exercising, either.

Research on the effects of music during exercise has been done for years. In 1911, an American researcher, Leonard Ayres, found that cyclists pedaled faster while listening to music than they did in silence.

This happens because listening to music can drown out our brain's cries of fatigue. As our body realizes we're tired and wants to stop exercising, it sends signals to the brain to stop for a break. Listening to music competes for our brain's attention, and can help us to override those signals of fatigue, though this is mostly beneficial for low- and moderate-intensity exercise. During high-intensity exercise, music isn't as powerful at pulling our brain's attention away from the pain of the workout.

Not only can we push through the pain to exercise longer and harder when we listen to music, but it can actually help us to use our energy more efficiently. A 2012 study showed that cyclists who listened to music required 7% less oxygen to do the same work as those who cycled in silence.

Some recent research has shown that there's a ceiling effect on music at around 145 bpm, where anything higher doesn't seem to add much motivation, so keep that in mind when choosing your workout playlist. Here is how this breaks down for different genres:

Now if we team up these different "tempos" with the actual work-out we're doing, we can be in much better sync and find the right beat for our exercise. If you match up the above with the graphic below it should be super easy to get into a good groove:

So in the same way that exercising makes us happier, it's not surprising that music adds significantly to our work-out success.

What have you noticed about how music affects you? Let us know in the comments.

Image credits: Suites Culturelles, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Ali eminov, PaceDJ

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
8 Amazing, Little-Known Ways Music Affects the Brain

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Learn how music affects many different areas of the brain and how it changes some of the ways that we react to things without us even realizing it:

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Music improves brain health and function in many ways. It makes you smarter, happier, and more productive at any age. Listening is good, playing is better.

# data[].attributes.headline
SUBTOPICS: Do different genres of music affect the brain differently?

# data[].attributes.subject
SUBTOPICS: Do different genres of music affect the brain differently?

# data[].attributes.headline
Could music help mental illnesses like depression?

# data[].attributes.subject
Could music help mental illnesses like depression?